What is CRO, conversion rate optimisation, for ecommerce?

If you run or work in an ecommerce business, you will always be looking for ways to increase your sales. So CRO or conversion rate optimisation is one of the key metrics you should care about – review and improve it.

Are potential buyers leaving your online store before purchasing products? Have you looked at the potential reasons why they may be leaving and ways to improve the number of visitors who end up buying? Increasing that number of people who complete the main action, or convert, is called conversion rate optimisation.

Some of the reasons why more people are not buying your products could be:

product pages are loading too slowly

not enough information provided about the product

your ecommerce site has poor navigation

information about delivery and returns costs is too confusing/difficult to find

need more time to think before committing to a purchase

In the video below, Edward gives an overview of CRO and talks through some examples of tests you could be running to find out how to improve your conversion rate.

Video transcription

so one of the important things, if you’re going to increase your return on investment of marketing campaign, is to think about how users engage with your page and this is typically called conversion rate optimisation or increasing the percentage of people who land on the page or visit the page to those that do the main action

let’s look at this example which is a very generic e-commerce product page as you can see the very obvious call to action, which is highlighted, is to click the Buy button to add it to cart

if we get a marketing campaign to push people to page let’s say the product here is some pink shoes and our campaign says buy pink shoes we are wasting money that’s never going to have a positive return on investment if people out on the page and don’t even like the content they don’t engage with it

so we need to measure very carefully what is the bounce rate of our landing page, and the bounce rate is the percent of people who land on the page and then go away with them without doing any further action and

conversion rate optimisation is really the process through which you might go to get more people to convert – in this case to click Buy so we might look at the text on the page the heading could we change the copy to make it more engaging or to make it more fitting with the users expectations

so if we advertise for pink shoes this better say pink shoes somewhere in the copy

the next thing we’ll optimise is the image – is it appealing, is it easy to see what the product is, maybe we might add a 3d visualisation animation of the product for them to get a better feel for it

and then we might experiment with a Buy button itself – how about making it bigger or make it red

this might seem really trivial but you’d be amazed the difference in conversion between let’s say a blue button and a red button, so altogether we can run a series of tests

in the next chapter, we’re going to look at a series of tests you might run to test those things but the process of doing it is conversion rate optimisation and that’s really going to help you boost that return investment from any given marketing campaign